Page 67 of Bearly Out Loud

“Bees are diurnal. They?—”

“If you explain bee biology to me in a parking garage, I’m revoking your escort privileges.”

He smiled. She caught it—caught him smiling at her in a parking structure at night while she threatened his escort privileges—and her own mouth betrayed her. The corner lifted. Half an inch. She looked away before he could count it as a win.

Level three. Her car was visible—a black Audi, northwest corner, exactly where it always was. The structure was mostly empty at this hour. A scattering of vehicles on the lower levels, maintenance lights humming overhead, the echo of their footsteps bouncing off concrete pillars.

His bear had been restless for the last twenty minutes. Not the warm restlessness that came from being near Nari—the other kind. The kind that tightened the skin along his shoulders and sharpened his senses until the parking structure’s ambientnoise separated into individual sounds: the hum of the lights, the tick of cooling engines, the faint whistle of air through the stairwell.

And footsteps. Two sets. Moving with a rhythm that didn’t match the pace of people walking to their cars.

He stopped. Nari took two more steps before she noticed his absence and turned.

“What?”

His bear lunged. Not forward—up. Under his skin, pressing at the edges of his control, flooding his senses with information his human brain was still sorting: two males, approaching from the east stairwell, their scent carrying gun oil and adrenaline and the chemical tang of people who had been told to do a specific job tonight.

He stepped in front of her. Between her and the east stairwell. The movement was automatic—his body placing itself there before the thought finished forming.

“Dojin.” Her voice had shifted. The teasing was gone. She’d read his posture, read the tension that had rewritten his body in the space of a breath. “What’s happening?”

“Get behind me.”

“That’s not an answ?—”

They came around the pillar.

Two men.Dark clothing, tactical boots, the compact efficiency of hired professionals. The one on the left had a build that suggested military training. The one on the right held his hand inside his jacket in a way that left no ambiguity about what was under it.

They weren’t looking at Dojin. They were looking at Nari.

“Miss Wixx.” The one on the left. Calm voice. Pleasant, even. The pleasantness of a man following instructions. “We need to have a conversation about some documents your family possesses.”

Nari’s hand found the back of his shirt. Her fist closed around a handful of cotton. Tight, controlled, the grip of a person who was scared and channeling it into her fists instead of her voice.

“I don’t discuss documents in parking garages with men I haven’t been introduced to.” Her voice was steady. The sarcasm was there—running, always running—but thinned. Stretched over fear like fabric over a frame. “Call my father’s office. Business hours. He loves meetings.”

The man on the right moved. Fast. Sidestepped Dojin and reached for Nari’s arm.

His hand made it to within six inches of her wrist.

Dojin didn’t decide to shift. The decision was made somewhere deeper than thought—somewhere primal, somewhere ancient, somewhere in the bedrock of what it meant to be a bear whose mate was being reached for by a man with a gun inside his jacket.

The shift was instantaneous.

Not the controlled, practiced transformation he’d been trained for since childhood. Not the smooth transition from man to bear that experienced shifters managed with grace. This was detonation. Adrenaline-fueled, rage-driven, every cell in his body recreating itself simultaneously because the alternative—remaining human for the half second it would take that hand to close around her arm—was unacceptable.

Bones cracked. Muscles tore and reformed. His clothes shredded—the shirt, the trousers, the shoes, all of it gone in the space between one heartbeat and the next. His skull reshaped. His spine elongated. Eight hundred pounds of Kodiak bearmaterialized where a man in rolled sleeves had been standing, and the concrete cracked under the impact of new weight arriving all at once.

The sound shook the structure. Not a roar—not yet. The sound of a body displacing air, of mass arriving, of the physical world adjusting to accommodate a creature that filled the entire lane between parked cars. Car alarms shrieked on three levels. The fluorescent light directly above him shattered from the vibration, raining glass that glittered in his fur like scattered diamonds.

The operative’s hand froze inches from Nari’s wrist. His eyes went wide. White showed all around the iris.

Dojin roared.

The sound was not human. Was not meant for human ears. It came from a chest cavity the size of a barrel, powered by lungs that could bellow across mountain valleys, and it hit the concrete walls of the concrete structure and bounced back amplified. The operative staggered. The other one—the one on the left—drew his weapon. Dojin clocked it like he clocked the weather: a fact, irrelevant to the outcome.

He hit the right-side operative first. One swipe. Open-pawed, seven hundred pounds of force behind it. The man left the ground. Flew sideways. Struck the driver’s door of a silver Honda and crumpled it inward—metal screaming, glass shattering, the alarm joining the chorus of the other three already screaming on this level. He hit the pavement and didn’t get up.